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The Americans
- Thread starter April
- Start date
Mojo2
Gold Member
- Oct 28, 2013
- 6,210
- 1,026
- 190
This show is so damn good I think it might be soon gone.
Many of the best shows disappear much too soon.
Think, "Southland."
Anyway, here's the basic plot of the show and then a recap of the latest episode.
TV Review: The Americans Season 2 -- Vulture
I bet you will be intrigued if you read the recap.
And if you watch the show, you'll be hooked.
The Americans Recap: Partial Truths -- Vulture
And for those of you who have an Android powered mobile device TV Portal features replays of The Americans for free or very cheap.
TV Portal | Home
Many of the best shows disappear much too soon.
Think, "Southland."
Anyway, here's the basic plot of the show and then a recap of the latest episode.
2/26/2014 at 7:00 AM 7 Comments
Seitz on The Americans Season 2: Spycraft, Sex, and Days at the Fair
By Matt Zoller Seitz
Some of the best cable dramas are built around sustained acts of deception. The chemistry teacher is a drug manufacturer. The waste-management consultant is a gangster. The attractive young travel agents and devoted parents who live in that boring suburban house are Soviet spies who screw and kill for the Motherland. The element of playacting makes things fun for the audience at times it's almost a sitcom-ish, I Love Lucy sort of fun, as in, "How on earth will the heroine fool law enforcement this time?" but it also makes things pleasurably dizzying, because it lifts familiar issues and questions out of their standard contexts and makes you think about them as statements, and about the words themselves, and what they refer to.
When, during the season-two premiere of FX's The Americans the one about the Soviet spies, natch a character says "I'm not sure I'm cut out for this," the subject is marriage, or seems to be. But because the marriage is a sham entered into by the speaker, Soviet spy Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), so that he can gain state secrets via his new "wife," Martha (Alison Wright), a secretary in the Washington, D.C. FBI counter-terrorist office you don't respond to it as you would if it were just some TV husband discussing some standard TV marriage. The "this" in the sentence could refer his specific, "real" marriage, entered into under false pretenses. Or it could refer to Philip's real marriage to fellow spy Elizabeth (Keri Russell), the mother of his two children, Paige (Holly Taylor) and Henry (Keidrich Sellati), or to the umbrella deception that is unfurled over everything: the notion that Philip is actually an American.
Funny thing is, of course, a lot of the time, he feels like he is an American. (He loves country music.) And his "real" marriage, to Elizabeth, was never formalized with a marriage certificate; it's just another role, one they've both been performing for nearly two decades. Not for nothing does this first episode pivot on screenings of the 1981 drama The French Lieutenant's Woman, a film about acting based on a novel about storytelling. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night and as I've quoted so many times in my Americans recaps we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. And isn't that what much of life is? Pretending? Deciding to live the day-to-day performance of an ideal, a belief, an emotion, a set of principles, a faith?
These are the sorts of 3 a.m.-in-the-dorm questions that The Americans invites. It's a testament to series creator Joe Weisberg, executive producer Joel Fields, and their writers, filmmakers, and actors that you don't immediately think about Philip and Elizabeth as case studies, or as characters anchoring ethical puzzles. You're too busy enjoying the spycraft, the fights, the chases, and the sex.
But it's these deeper questions that give the action and melodrama a bit of existential heft, and redirect our vicarious enjoyment away from fantasy and back towards reality. FBI agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) the Jenningses' neighbor, and the man in whose office Martha works is half-assedly performing a "happy marriage" with his wife Sandra (Susan Misner) while secretly diddling his KGB "contact" Nina (Annet Mahendru) in a "safe house." (If any series begs for ironic quotation marks, it's this one.) But there's still real affection between Stan and Sandra, however sad and dilapidated their marriage has become; there's also real affection in the Stan-Nina relationship, even though it's outwardly based on mutual exploitation (each is trying to gain secrets from, and spread misinformation through, the other).
In a future episode, a colleague of Nina's who knows about her relationship with Stan warns that even when the mind knows that a sexual relationship is purely mercenary or expedient, the body reads it as sincere. The blood that rushes excitedly toward certain parts doesn't care about the intellectual aspect of the performance. It just knows, Here I am with the body that gives me pleasure. How much "acting" is going on, really? How much acting is going on when Philip or Elizabeth seduces a mark while dressed (and bewigged) as some fantasy construct? Is the role-playing that happens in the show's sex scenes really all that profoundly different from the role-playing that happens in anyone's bedroom, apart from the fact that it involves the possible exchange of state secrets as well as fluids?
You've probably noticed that I haven't described the plot of the new season in detail. That's because I'm going to be recapping it again this season, and I'd rather not ruin key developments that I myself appreciated. Suffice to say that the emphasis shifts a bit, away from marriage (or "marriage") and toward family, and that the Philip/Martha marriage seems less of a sitcom flourish and more of a tragedy in the making, and that Paige's suspicions about her parents become increasingly central to the show's emotions, even though she isn't entirely sure what bad deeds her parents are enacting. Also: The wig thing is addressed, excitingly, immediately, and with humor. See you every Thursday morning for the next three months, everybody.
TV Review: The Americans Season 2 -- Vulture
I bet you will be intrigued if you read the recap.
And if you watch the show, you'll be hooked.
Yesterday at 12:50 PM 30 Comments
The Americans Recap: Partial Truths
By Matt Zoller Seitz
THE AMERICANS -- "A Little Night Music" -- Episode 4 (Airs Wednesday, March 19, 10:00 PM e/p) -- Pictured: (L-R) Margo Martindale as Claudia, Keri Russell as Elizabeth Jennings -- CR: Patrick Harbron/FX
The Americans
A Little Night Music
Season 2 | Episode 04
Rate This Episode!
Readers: 4.5
Editor: 3
The Walk In
Complete Series
Coverage »
"Lying will not be tolerated," Philip Jennings told his rebellious daughter Paige in last week's episode of The Americans. You have to be a good actor to say that with a straight face when you're into the sorts of things Philip is into. Philip is good enough to fool his various marks and he's certainly forceful enough to intimidate his teenage daughter, but he's not intimidating enough to stop her own comparatively unconvincing lies or deceptive behavior. Elizabeth's discovery this week of the real reason Paige snuck out (to attend a Bible study group introduced to her by a girl she met on the bus ride to Aunt Helen's last week) is a devastating blow for both parents. In expressing their anger, they have to concentrate on the basic act of deception (claiming to be one place when she was really somewhere else). They can't discuss the real reasons they're so upset: They feel guilty for neglecting Paige's discontent because they're overworked, forever rushing around committing crimes in the name of Mother Russia.
Neither Paige nor Henry has any clue what their parents are really up to, much less who they really are. They have no way of knowing how deep Elizabeth's disgust at religion runs because they don't know she was raised as an atheist in another country, on another continent, speaking a different language and living under a different name. This show is a layer cake of lies. And yet the characters who behave deceptively in the name of their jobs still have to be truthful in aspects of their private lives, and the parents among them have to instill some semblance of good values in their children. Under such circumstances, every move is a kind of hypocrisy.
Written by newly installed Americans co-producer Stephen Schiff, a film critic turned screenwriter, this week's installment was called "A Little Night Music," but despite lifting its title from a Stephen Sondheim musical, there was no singing; it was more of an homage to Sondheim's source, Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night, which traced the romantic problems of several couples over the course of one evening, and was itself strongly influenced by Shakepeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
We followed many pairings over the course of this episode, some romantic, others platonic. At the Soviet embassy, Oleg used his family connections to gain access to Nina's sexually explicit reports on her trysts with FBI agent Stan Beeman. This was the triumphant end to a personal mission that has always struck me as being more about Oleg's personal attraction to Nina than to any legitimate concern about the mother country.
Oleg's monologue to Nina about how sexual body parts know only truth even when they're being deployed in service of lies would've seemed boldly flirtatious if he hadn't been looming over Nina, his big arm blocking her from leaving the room. Looped into all this Oleg-Nina business was Nina's boss, Arkady. He and Nina are one more couple, a platonic one. Arkady has grown professionally close to Nina and become a sort of mentor to her, forgiving her earlier betrayal of Russia after she converted it into double-agency by bedding down with Stan.
Stan, meanwhile, is part of two couples. He's married to Sandra yet sleeping with Nina. He drunkenly confesses his adultery to Philip in a bar a disclosure that will surely be used against him later but it seems triggered by other events in his professional life: the fallout from his shooting of an assassin last week. The act should have won Stan a commendation (his first; tellingly, he received medals for his undercover work but never picked them up) but instead it triggered a joint House-Senate inquiry to learn why such a dangerous Soviet agent was allowed to roam freely through D.C. in the first place.
Beeman's boss, Agent Gad, was superseded by another officer brought in from Atlanta. (I feel like we're being set up for a couple of mirrored subplots involving officers at the FBI and the Rezidentura: Gad and Arkady, both of whom are endangered by office intrigue and the actions of subordinates.)
Intriguingly, Stan isn't the only outwardly respectable character in this episode who's having an intense secret affair. There's also a dissident Russian Jew that the consulate wants abducted, as punishment for siding against them and out of fear that he'll help the Americans with submarine cloaking technology; as Philip tracks him, the man begins to seem like a kind of dopplegänger for Stan, and maybe for Phillip as well, who's embroiled in a secret marriage to Martha, who works as a secretary for Stan's boss at the FBI. (Judging from the arguments about the "lazy romantic morning" gone awry, it looks as though this plotline is about to be written out somehow.)
Let's back up to that moment between Stan and Philip in the bar, though, because it's indicative of one of this show's great talents: portraying the emotional domino effect that leads people to make a decision, commit an act of violence, or disclose a secret in one part of their life after suffering trauma in another.
Stan reveals his affair with Nina (though he doesn't mention her name or occupation) only after talking to Philip about shooting that would-be assassin. It's clear from this scene and an earlier one between him and Gad that the act awakened old traumas from his undercover days, and somehow these feelings turned over and over inside him until he spat out the disclosure of his affair. It's as if he couldn't tell the whole truth about one thing (the shooting, or shootings, that he's been a part of), so he told a partial truth about something else (the affair). This is psychologically true to how human beings behave, and it's the sort of mental machination you rarely see depicted on TV.
Something similar is happening with Elizabeth in this episode. Early on, she and Philip are surprised (as are we!) by the reappearance of their old boss Claudia (Margo Martindale; welcome back, old friend), who gives them what sounds suspiciously like an off-the-books mission: track down the assassin of Leanne and Emmett and their daughter. The probable assassin, she tells them, is a man named Andrew Larrick, who was being blackmailed by Emmett and Leanne for being gay (which can't have been an easy way to live if you're a Navy SEAL circa 1981, as this character apparently is). To get to Larrick, the Jennings will need to go through Brett Mullen, a seaman living in Down Neck. Philip volunteers to go because the young man is clearly a bookish type who offers "a lot of ways in," but Elizabeth insists on going herself. Why?
Initially, I think it's because she still feels tremendous guilt over the killings of Leanne and her family, and a sense of personal responsibility for Leanne's teenage son, an academically gifted young man who was about to go off to college. There's something strangely motherly about the way she flirts with Brett, who's almost young enough to be her own son, and I think it's also revealing that when he says he can't go through with stealing Larrick's file, rather than have some sort of intercourse with him, she gives him a hand job in the front seat of his car, as if (in some perverse way), she's trying to maintain boundaries.
There's also a powerful transference going on when Elizabeth tells Brett that she wants the file in order to punish Larrick for raping her. Larrick did not rape her, of course; but Elizabeth was raped back in Russia, when she was about Brett's age, by a superior officer who fit the physical description of the Navy Seal she's going after in the present. When Elizabeth tells Brett about the anger and helplessness she felt as she was being attacked (stopping just short of providing physical details, just as Stan stops short of providing physical details of the shootings he's committed) she nearly breaks down. She's telling a lie, but she's also telling the truth: a classic Americans moment.
All the scenes between Elizabeth and Brett mix a strange maternal protectiveness with femme fatale manipulation and a bizarre eruption of self-therapy. It all coalesces in that final scene of Philip and Elizabeth trying to abduct the dissident and getting attacked by another male-female team of unknown assailants. Elizabeth's opponent is a hulking man who nearly gets the better of her. It's surely no accident that she finally gains the upper hand after he turns her around and pushes her against the car, in a position similar to the one she described to Brett (describing a made-up rape) and back in the pilot, to Philip (recalling her actual rape). She keeps bashing the guy's head over and over and over, to Philip's horror; it's clear to him, and probably to her, that there's something else going on besides a street fight. Philip and Elizabeth beat and killed Elizabeth's rapist in the pilot episode, of course, and it's worth remembering where Elizabeth's initial showdown with her assailant took place: in the Jennings' garage, in a close-quarters fistfight that occurred right next to a sedan very similar to the one that Elizabeth gets slammed against in the final scene of "A Little Night Music."
The Americans Recap: Partial Truths
By Matt Zoller Seitz
THE AMERICANS -- "A Little Night Music" -- Episode 4 (Airs Wednesday, March 19, 10:00 PM e/p) -- Pictured: (L-R) Margo Martindale as Claudia, Keri Russell as Elizabeth Jennings -- CR: Patrick Harbron/FX
The Americans
A Little Night Music
Season 2 | Episode 04
Rate This Episode!
Readers: 4.5
Editor: 3
The Walk In
Complete Series
Coverage »
"Lying will not be tolerated," Philip Jennings told his rebellious daughter Paige in last week's episode of The Americans. You have to be a good actor to say that with a straight face when you're into the sorts of things Philip is into. Philip is good enough to fool his various marks and he's certainly forceful enough to intimidate his teenage daughter, but he's not intimidating enough to stop her own comparatively unconvincing lies or deceptive behavior. Elizabeth's discovery this week of the real reason Paige snuck out (to attend a Bible study group introduced to her by a girl she met on the bus ride to Aunt Helen's last week) is a devastating blow for both parents. In expressing their anger, they have to concentrate on the basic act of deception (claiming to be one place when she was really somewhere else). They can't discuss the real reasons they're so upset: They feel guilty for neglecting Paige's discontent because they're overworked, forever rushing around committing crimes in the name of Mother Russia.
Neither Paige nor Henry has any clue what their parents are really up to, much less who they really are. They have no way of knowing how deep Elizabeth's disgust at religion runs because they don't know she was raised as an atheist in another country, on another continent, speaking a different language and living under a different name. This show is a layer cake of lies. And yet the characters who behave deceptively in the name of their jobs still have to be truthful in aspects of their private lives, and the parents among them have to instill some semblance of good values in their children. Under such circumstances, every move is a kind of hypocrisy.
Written by newly installed Americans co-producer Stephen Schiff, a film critic turned screenwriter, this week's installment was called "A Little Night Music," but despite lifting its title from a Stephen Sondheim musical, there was no singing; it was more of an homage to Sondheim's source, Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night, which traced the romantic problems of several couples over the course of one evening, and was itself strongly influenced by Shakepeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
We followed many pairings over the course of this episode, some romantic, others platonic. At the Soviet embassy, Oleg used his family connections to gain access to Nina's sexually explicit reports on her trysts with FBI agent Stan Beeman. This was the triumphant end to a personal mission that has always struck me as being more about Oleg's personal attraction to Nina than to any legitimate concern about the mother country.
Oleg's monologue to Nina about how sexual body parts know only truth even when they're being deployed in service of lies would've seemed boldly flirtatious if he hadn't been looming over Nina, his big arm blocking her from leaving the room. Looped into all this Oleg-Nina business was Nina's boss, Arkady. He and Nina are one more couple, a platonic one. Arkady has grown professionally close to Nina and become a sort of mentor to her, forgiving her earlier betrayal of Russia after she converted it into double-agency by bedding down with Stan.
Stan, meanwhile, is part of two couples. He's married to Sandra yet sleeping with Nina. He drunkenly confesses his adultery to Philip in a bar a disclosure that will surely be used against him later but it seems triggered by other events in his professional life: the fallout from his shooting of an assassin last week. The act should have won Stan a commendation (his first; tellingly, he received medals for his undercover work but never picked them up) but instead it triggered a joint House-Senate inquiry to learn why such a dangerous Soviet agent was allowed to roam freely through D.C. in the first place.
Beeman's boss, Agent Gad, was superseded by another officer brought in from Atlanta. (I feel like we're being set up for a couple of mirrored subplots involving officers at the FBI and the Rezidentura: Gad and Arkady, both of whom are endangered by office intrigue and the actions of subordinates.)
Intriguingly, Stan isn't the only outwardly respectable character in this episode who's having an intense secret affair. There's also a dissident Russian Jew that the consulate wants abducted, as punishment for siding against them and out of fear that he'll help the Americans with submarine cloaking technology; as Philip tracks him, the man begins to seem like a kind of dopplegänger for Stan, and maybe for Phillip as well, who's embroiled in a secret marriage to Martha, who works as a secretary for Stan's boss at the FBI. (Judging from the arguments about the "lazy romantic morning" gone awry, it looks as though this plotline is about to be written out somehow.)
Let's back up to that moment between Stan and Philip in the bar, though, because it's indicative of one of this show's great talents: portraying the emotional domino effect that leads people to make a decision, commit an act of violence, or disclose a secret in one part of their life after suffering trauma in another.
Stan reveals his affair with Nina (though he doesn't mention her name or occupation) only after talking to Philip about shooting that would-be assassin. It's clear from this scene and an earlier one between him and Gad that the act awakened old traumas from his undercover days, and somehow these feelings turned over and over inside him until he spat out the disclosure of his affair. It's as if he couldn't tell the whole truth about one thing (the shooting, or shootings, that he's been a part of), so he told a partial truth about something else (the affair). This is psychologically true to how human beings behave, and it's the sort of mental machination you rarely see depicted on TV.
Something similar is happening with Elizabeth in this episode. Early on, she and Philip are surprised (as are we!) by the reappearance of their old boss Claudia (Margo Martindale; welcome back, old friend), who gives them what sounds suspiciously like an off-the-books mission: track down the assassin of Leanne and Emmett and their daughter. The probable assassin, she tells them, is a man named Andrew Larrick, who was being blackmailed by Emmett and Leanne for being gay (which can't have been an easy way to live if you're a Navy SEAL circa 1981, as this character apparently is). To get to Larrick, the Jennings will need to go through Brett Mullen, a seaman living in Down Neck. Philip volunteers to go because the young man is clearly a bookish type who offers "a lot of ways in," but Elizabeth insists on going herself. Why?
Initially, I think it's because she still feels tremendous guilt over the killings of Leanne and her family, and a sense of personal responsibility for Leanne's teenage son, an academically gifted young man who was about to go off to college. There's something strangely motherly about the way she flirts with Brett, who's almost young enough to be her own son, and I think it's also revealing that when he says he can't go through with stealing Larrick's file, rather than have some sort of intercourse with him, she gives him a hand job in the front seat of his car, as if (in some perverse way), she's trying to maintain boundaries.
There's also a powerful transference going on when Elizabeth tells Brett that she wants the file in order to punish Larrick for raping her. Larrick did not rape her, of course; but Elizabeth was raped back in Russia, when she was about Brett's age, by a superior officer who fit the physical description of the Navy Seal she's going after in the present. When Elizabeth tells Brett about the anger and helplessness she felt as she was being attacked (stopping just short of providing physical details, just as Stan stops short of providing physical details of the shootings he's committed) she nearly breaks down. She's telling a lie, but she's also telling the truth: a classic Americans moment.
All the scenes between Elizabeth and Brett mix a strange maternal protectiveness with femme fatale manipulation and a bizarre eruption of self-therapy. It all coalesces in that final scene of Philip and Elizabeth trying to abduct the dissident and getting attacked by another male-female team of unknown assailants. Elizabeth's opponent is a hulking man who nearly gets the better of her. It's surely no accident that she finally gains the upper hand after he turns her around and pushes her against the car, in a position similar to the one she described to Brett (describing a made-up rape) and back in the pilot, to Philip (recalling her actual rape). She keeps bashing the guy's head over and over and over, to Philip's horror; it's clear to him, and probably to her, that there's something else going on besides a street fight. Philip and Elizabeth beat and killed Elizabeth's rapist in the pilot episode, of course, and it's worth remembering where Elizabeth's initial showdown with her assailant took place: in the Jennings' garage, in a close-quarters fistfight that occurred right next to a sedan very similar to the one that Elizabeth gets slammed against in the final scene of "A Little Night Music."
The Americans Recap: Partial Truths -- Vulture
And for those of you who have an Android powered mobile device TV Portal features replays of The Americans for free or very cheap.
TV Portal | Home
Honest review. Having been involved in this stuff back in the 80's I can tell you it is true to life. The show does a good job laying everything out as it was. However reality is pretty boring. And that does not equate to high ratings. But it is on FX. So it might have a chance.
Honest review. I love it. The characters, interpersonal dynamics, and the actors making it happen combine to make this a damned entertaining series. But definitely not for kids.
If you haven't seen it, I would suggest checking it out.
If you haven't seen it, I would suggest checking it out.
Honest review. I love it. The characters, interpersonal dynamics, and the actors making it happen combine to make this a damned entertaining series. But definitely not for kids.
If you haven't seen it, I would suggest checking it out.
In my opinion it is the best series EVER! Quietly compelling, great acting and it is in it's second season.
The Americans Is the Realest, and Scariest, Spy Show on TV
"Comrades," the second-season premiere, raises the FX series' stakes by making its secret agents face a universal fear.
Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, the protagonists of FXs The Americans, are very good spies. But they arent super spies. Were reminded of this at the start of Wednesdays Season Two premiere. Elizabeth leaves the cabin where shes been convalescing for months after a botched intelligence operation. Philips attempt to send an intimidating message back to Afghani freedom fighters turns bad, and hes forced to kill two more people than hed wanted toincluding an innocent teenager.
Related Story
The Refreshing, Radical Restraint of The Americans
Spying, see, is hard.
The Americans Is the Realest, and Scariest, Spy Show on TV - Spencer Kornhaber - The Atlantic
Netflixs House of Cards the prettiest dress in the TV store these days got shut out of the TCA Awards tonight. It had been up for Outstanding New Program and Program of the Year, but those wins went instead to FXs The Americans and AMCs Breaking Bad, respectively. (Scroll down for the full winners list.) [2013 TCA Awards]
2013 TCA Awards: 'Breaking Bad,' 'The Americans' Win - Full Winners
Set during the Cold War period in the 1980s, The Americans is the story of Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), two Soviet KGB officers posing as an American married couple living in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. with their unsuspecting children (Holly Taylor and Keidrich Sellati) and their neighbor, Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an FBI counterintelligence agent.
The Americans (2013 TV series) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__nTeZrEtvw]The Americans - Season 1 Trailer (2013) - YouTube[/ame]
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36_t9E4cD38]The Americans 2 Season 2 Promotional Trailer - YouTube[/ame]
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